Your site does not provide contact details.   Where are you located? How can customers reach you if they have a question about an order? How long is a package going to take to get to them once they order? Are you even a legitimate business?

If, like many artists, you are selling online from your home and don't want potential customers to show up at your door, get a P O box for US mail and a voice mail number to accept phone inquiries.

Your site is confusing to navigate, without a clear structure or way for a visitor to tell where he is and where he wants to go.   You and your web designer should work together to organize your site and provide plenty of clear, unambiguous direction to help your customers and visitors find the information and products they came to find.

Make sure that every page contains information on where the visitor is and how to get back to the home page — she may have followed a link from Google and ended up on an internal page.

Your site has too many levels to click through before something useful is encountered. There is a tradeoff between putting everything on just a few pages (thus requiring your visitors to scroll down through enormously long pages) and breaking it up into too many short pages. Research has shown that visitors are generally willing to make three clicks before they find the item they want.

From your home page, this should be the customer path to purchasing:

Product Category >> Specific Product >> Add to Cart. Three clicks and you've made a sale!

There is no way to search your site.   If you have an online store, the software should include a way to set up categories of products. The front page to the store also will have a search box to help customers find a product if they aren't sure which category it might belong in. (Is it a sweater because it's knit, or is it a jacket because it has buttons? Maybe it's just outerwear?)

If you are an artist selling from an online gallery, a text search box is less important because your potential buyers will be browsing visually rather than searching for "oil painting, mountain scene, blue with magenta highlights." Make sure that your gallery is logical and well-organized, provide a page or pages with thumbnail images, and let your visitors find the one piece that sings to them.

Your store software doesn't accept credit card payments online.   If you are selling online, never make your customers print out an order form to mail in a payment or make a phone call (or worse yet, email!) to provide a credit card number. Impulse buys are just that — impulsive. Make it easy!       Next »

1   2   3   4